Barcelona
I’ve just spent 5 days in Barcelona and I loved every minute of it. How I regret not including a weekend in my trip. The city was clean, the transport network efficient, the weather superb, the food sublime, and the city had a wonderful buzz; it felt alive, lived in, enjoyable.
My hotel wasn’t particularly good, but I found a number of great patisserias nearby that supplied an alternative breakfast. The first time I walked past one of these I saw a number of Barcelona natives standing around a bar table, eating a pastry and sipping an espresso. I joined them the next morning and every morning after that.
I had a number of memorable meals: a ham dish (obligatory in Spain) at els quatre gats (photo coming), and a superb array of dishes at the Windsor (rather english sounding!) and tapas of course, at various restaurants. Lots of seafood (I generally only eat fish, though I did have another taste of Arròs negre) and I avoided the goats cheese (learned that after visiting Toledo a few years back).
I had a half day to myself the first day I arrived, and so visited Casa Batlló, one of Gaudi’s buildings. It was quite something, and you can see why it’s called the house of bones.
On the final evening, at around 2am, Victoria and Simone decided that we needed to visit the Sagrada Familia, which we duly did. Luckily it’s well lit for the batty tourists. Wow. Describing it, I could only come up with “organic gothic.” It felt a little like a mixture between the architecture and feel of the alien structures in Alien, and some of the cruisers in Babylon 5. Seriously!
Conferences are really about meeting people, and Barcelona’s cafes and tapas bars provided many opportunities. Patrick, Arunabh,Victoria, Quinton, Dain, Simone, Eddie, Pieter, Marcus x 2, Scott, Gary, Catarina, Hussein, Linda, Martin and many more made it even more worthwhile.
